This invention relates to a disk player for playing disks such as musical performance disks.
In playing a plurality of compact disks with a disk player, it is necessary to replace the disks successively. The replacement of the disks is rather troublesome. In order to eliminate this difficulty, recently a disk player has been proposed in the art in which disk bearing trays (hereinafter referred to merely as "trays" or "disk trays", when applicable) are provided in two layers to play a plurality of compact disks successively.
A disk player of this type has been disclosed by Japanese Patent Application (OPI) No. 224969/1989 (the term "OPI" as used herein means an "unexamined published application"). The disk player is designed as follows: two disk trays are juxtaposed in such a manner that one of the two disk trays is located above the other. The trays are engaged with the cam grooves of a pair of rack members which are laid in the front-to-rear direction of the player housing. As the rack members move back and forth, the cam grooves move the trays thereby to move the disks on the trays to the playing position, the waiting position, and the ejecting position. Further, in the above-noted disk player, a mechanism which includes an optical pickup section for reading data from disks is fixed; that is, it cannot be moved vertically. Hence, the cam grooves are so designed as to move the trays vertically to the playing position.
As was described above, in the conventional disk player, the trays are moved back and forth while being engaged with the cam grooves of the rack members, and the trays are moved vertically to the playing position with the aid of the cam grooves. Hence, the trays necessarily have a long backward and forward stroke; that is, the disk player itself is large in length.
Furthermore, in the conventional disk player, it is necessary to provide a pair of the rack members with the cam grooves on each of the right and left side walls of the casing. Hence, the disk player, requiring a large number of components, is intricate in construction.